Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

BTW, barcode wands not only come with manuals more complete than a very expensive PC's manual, but they *must* come with decent manuals.

The wand can be a keyboard or a serial port to the PC, user's choice. So how do you configure the wand? You scan bar codes printed in the manual for the settings you want to configure.

Marijuana is legal here, cannabis dispensaries have popped up, & they're helping to revitalize the city's sagging economy as much as any other local business.

But two of those dispensaries have opened up within sight of the Socorro County Republican Party office: one two doors down, & one just across the street.

I wonder if those were deliberate, & I hope it's a middle finger to the GOP if so.

Today in Windows hardware support is a joke:
A cheap barcode scanner wand barely as expensive as a cheap wired mouse.

Unix:
It just works! Literally plug and play.

Windows 10:
After half a minute, it said it just works, but "031225044071" is not a valid UPC for anything, let alone a router, and "E2>J1>53X>>1" is not a valid MAC address.

Those are consistent misreads on Windows, not random garbage, & I swapped it back to Unix to make sure the wand didn't break itself. Nope, it's just Windows.

@zorinlynx Safari is such a far distant second that it doesn't count. It's a monopoly, & across all platforms but iOS, Google owns it. https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

This tip brought to you by a help desk call about painfully slow Internet speed, yet the customer's router is freshly rebooted & the whole infrastructure up to the modem's LAN port tests good & speedy.

Windows tip:

Is your PC doing weird things? Things so weird & frustrating that no one else on the Internet has ever written about it? Never disabled Fast Startup? Don't even know what Fast Startup is? Here's the quick fix:

Restart Windows. Don't use "shut down," don't use "turn off," don't use the power button. Those aren't true Windows restarts.

Start -> power button icon -> Restart

Do that once a month or so, even if you turn it on and off daily, & half the weird things go away.

Today's Google Chrome monopoly makes the Microsoft Internet Explorer monopoly of not all that long ago look like peanuts.

Anyway, memorize Get Firefox dotcom.

Also, on a positive tangent, the long since lost manual for my printer has a section on cleaning the lone faulty part: the pick-up roller. Thank the Internet Archive for preserving the needful things their makers don't.

https://archive.org/details/printermanual-hp-laserjet-1100-user-guide/mode/2up

What really blows my mind is that Unix & Linux can print to it just fine on brand new hardware because HP themselves wrote & released cups drivers for it.

https://www.openprinting.org/printer/HP/HP-LaserJet_1100

HP once made tanks for soho printers. Now they just make disposable hardware with quickly abandoned support.

has printed an average of 5 pages a day for 25 years & counting.

My latest Unix workstation can print to it just fine.

My latest Linux workstation can print to it just fine.

My latest Windows workstation can't print to it at all because a compatible driver doesn't exist. No compatible driver exists because HP removed downloads for Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, & 10, & Microsoft removed it from Windows Update for 10 & 11.

But if I downgrade to S2K3, XP, 2K, or NT4, I can print to it.

@taco Also, I dove straight into FreeBSD knowing it's not at all intended for dedicated or general desktop use. Like with your poll's base Linux distros, there are derivatives designed for different & specialized use cases. This DistroWatch search lists a few FreeBSD-based ones: https://distrowatch.com/search.php?basedon=FreeBSD

@taco Functionally identical to Linux on the desktop, though I use wmx & a heavily customized .xsession instead of a full DE like XFCE.

In the shell the differences between BSD & GNU commands took a bit of getting used to, but that was made up for by a complete & actually useful `man` system. I don't miss GNU `info` at all.